


Thicker Than Blood

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Inception (2010), Ouran High School Host Club
Genre: Aging, Backstory, Character of Color, Families of Choice, Fusion, Gen, Limbo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-09
Updated: 2011-06-09
Packaged: 2017-10-21 07:03:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/222257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saito's family - his real family, not his brothers, not his father - are the ones who keep him company through Limbo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thicker Than Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Written for: [info]crossovers_las, prompt 'blood relations.' One of those '[character] and [character] are the same person' fics. This is the result of forgetting the deadline and being absolutely without the slightest idea of what to write, which should explain the strangeness of the fusion, a bit.

Saito trades in ideas more than anything else, creates and sells and steals and even, now, seeds – for risk and prices both aside, inception is a tool that will not go unused – but underneath all the shifts, there are some ideas he finds immutable. Beliefs that he will hold for the rest of his life.

First and foremost is the truth that family is about so much more than blood. Brotherhood, sisterhood, child and father are too limited and absolute; his older brothers, his father, they mean absolutely nothing to him.

(Well, something, once in a while. Enough for him to look at Robert Fischer and wonder what the younger man might have become with his own circle around him, and to wonder what he himself might have become had he attended a different academy.)

Nonetheless. Saito’s all but forgotten his father and brothers, names and businesses abandoned, and his sister only visited under layers of disguise. She’s the only one he glimpses in his dreams, and only once or twice in all those fifty years in Limbo.

But his real family – well. He sees them all.

Soft blond hair and merry laughter, never quite matured; the real Tamaki would have loved Limbo, Saito thinks, loved it with everything he had. A desperate and lonely fate to bemoan, waves to gaze upon as he wailed, gray sweeping horizons and rocks on which to pose, and when all of that grew dull there’d be a whole world for him to build.

Haruhi visits when it’s darkest, gray streaks and crows’-feet just as he remembers, but her lawyer’s suit the precise shade of Ouran blue. “I’m not real, remember,” she warns as she sits down, and to his surprise, he smiles. Haruhi, pragmatic and plain-spoken; it seems he won’t forget her any time soon.

“You would have liked Ariadne a great deal,” he tells her, and she nods.

Some days Hikaru comes alone to mock a chuckle out of Saito, some days it’s Kaoru to tease him alive when he takes a little too much pleasure in the silence, but the older he feels the more often they start to visit him at the same time. The two of them never quite outgrew their sense of mischief, and only Tamaki was ever better at taking Saito back to the strange and surreal madness that was so ordinary to them when they were young.

(Sometimes Saito wonders whether he’s imagining them younger than he’ll find them when he wakes, but then he catches the wrinkles forming around their eyes as they grin, the pale streaks in Kaoru’s hair and the signs of dye in Hikaru’s, and he remembers how old and how young they always seemed.)

It’s when the sunlight slanting in across the waves makes Tamaki’s imagined melodrama seem just a tiny bit too justified, when Saito starts to wonder what it means that even in his mind he can’t stay young, that he sees Mitsukuni and Takashi, the latter carrying the former through the tide. It’s a practical thing – Mitsukuni never did grow tall – but it makes them look like Hunny and Mori again.

They are each, in their own way, comforting company. Mitsukuni grew old with far more grace than any of them could ever have expected – any of them but Haruhi, perhaps, who simply laughed and said that he’d already had his midlife crisis – while Takashi seems impervious to the years beyond the odd line on his skin. Saito dreams up his best wine and the three of them share stories by the fireside, and Saito has naturally heard them all before, but that doesn’t really matter.

He long ago lost track of how many times Tamaki promised that everything would be all right as long as they had their family. Somewhere along the way, Saito came to believe it, and now it seems that in some way he will always, always have them. Love, evidently, outranks Limbo as well as blood.

After Cobb comes, after he wakes onto the plane to a body that hasn’t been his in decades and a promise it’s a miracle he hasn’t forgotten, he pays his dues and calls Tamaki.

There’s still a great deal that he can’t explain by phone, but nonetheless all six of them are waiting for him by the time he makes it home. Saito relaxes into their kindness, the mix of fawning and teasing and hard-jawed worry, and thinks if Robert Fischer had had friends like this, he would have either been immune to the inception or never needed it.

Saito can never explain the real shape of his life for anyone, but he wouldn’t trade his form of family for anything else there has ever been.


End file.
